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Colette Guillaumin (28 January 1934 – 10 May 2017), was a sociologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a French feminist.

She is an important theorist of racism, sexism and relationships of domination. She is also an important figure of material feminism.

Guillaumin offers an analysis of gender from a social constructionism point of view. Her theories intersect those of radical feminism and lay the groundwork for gender criticism.

Biography
Colette Guillaumin was born on 28th January 1934 in Thiers, France. She studied ethnology and psychology in Paris. She started her career at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1959, first as a technician, then as a researcher in 1962. In 1969, she presented her doctoral thesis, supervised by Roger Bastide and titled ''Un aspect de l'altérité sociale. L'idéologie raciste.'' Since 1969 Guillaumin has held a PhD in sociology at CNRS.

Between 1969 and 1972, she took part in the Laboratoire de sociologie de la dominance with Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Colette Capitan and Jacques Jenny.

She then launched her research on racism: following Frantz Fanon, she underlines the inferiorisation of non-white persons, and the hierarchy between individuals according to their biological characteristics. She is one of the first persons in the studies of racism to argue that “race” has no scientific value, that there is nothing “obvious” or ”natural” about this idea and that it is an arbitrary classification. She has worked to dismantle discourses based on naturalism and essentialism that legitimise discrimination.

In 1972, the publisher Mouton brought out the results of her thesis under the title L'Idéologie raciste, genèse et langage actuel, in which Guillaumin analyses racism as a social fact, and develops the idea of racialization, a concept she had already discussed in her previous studies.

In the late 1960's, Guillaumin took an interest in feminism. Already in 1972, she was drawing analogies between the concepts of race and sex in L'idéologie raciste. She was a member of the group of feminists who founded the journal Questions féministes in 1977 (even though she was not on the editorial board that launched the journal), which is the main source and the publication vehicle of material feminism. In 1978, she published an important two-part article in the journal, "Pratique du pouvoir et idée de nature", which theorises the appropriation of women through material social relationships and naturalism. She draws a parallel between racism and sexism and coined the term "sexage" for the appropriation of one sexual class by another.

Colette Guillaumin wrote several texts for the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples (Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples).

She died on 10th May 2017, in Lyon.